Off the menu …

Given we’re told this is a dog-eat-dog and fish-eat-fish world, there’s
something strange going on here

Carnivorous fish such as the Oriental sweetlip and the coral rock cod normally feed
voraciously upon shrimps and smaller fish. But these photographs show them placidly
allowing cleaner wrasse and cleaner shrimp1 to crawl around tongue, gill chamber
and vicious-looking teeth—and the cleaners don’t seem to be at all reticent
to enter the ‘jaws of death’. And when the wrasse and shrimp have finished
picking off parasites, the large fish let the cleaners go again without eating them.

The ‘cleaning symbiosis’ benefits both species,2,3 but evolutionary
mutation/selection can’t explain how it arose.4,5 Nobel laureate
Albert Szent-Györgi summed up the evolutionary puzzle presented by such symbiotic
relationships (he was actually referring to a much simpler relationship between
a young herring gull and its parent): ‘All this had to be developed simultaneously
[like the cleaner entering the big fish’s mouth at the same time the big fish
suspends his ‘normal’ (post-Fall)6
habit of eating small fish], which as a mutation has the probability of zero. I
am unable to approach this problem without supposing an innate drive in matter to
perfect itself.’7

The ‘cleaning symbiosis’ benefits both species, but evolutionary mutation/selection can’t explain how it arose.

Szent-Györgi then goes on to coin the term ‘syntropy’—meaning
some impersonal creative force needed to explain the ‘innate drive’
he mentioned.

So, if a brilliant Nobel prize-winning scientist, merely from observations of nature
itself, has suggested there is some kind of unseen creative force, is it not reasonable
to conclude from our observation of order in nature the existence of a Creator God?

References and notes

Younger readers might remember that the animated movies
Finding Nemo and Shark Tale respectively featured the cleaner shrimp
and cleaner wrasse as the characters ‘Jacques’ and ‘Oscar’. Return to text.

The ‘cleaners’ get to feed on the parasites, while
the ‘clients’ get clean—ungroomed fish can suffer more than a
four-fold increase in parasitic gnathiid isopods (which are microscopic crustaceans)
within 12 hours. Grutter, A.S., Cleaner fish really do clean, Nature
398(6729):672–673, 1999. Return to text.